Laura Stack creates ink paintings and collages that are an imagined view of artificial life or the
“new natural”. Her painting process begins by envisioning a fluid, bodily, cellular, or chemical world expressing its own laws of physics. Organic forms such as fungi and microscopic life and the biological processes of lava flow and branching inspire the painting imagery. She coaxes the ink across the paper’s surface, corralling, halting, spreading, and encouraging its direction. The ink shapes then morph into tendrils or bloom and disperse. Through physical gestures and the fluidity of the ink, she aims to create a sense of pulse and movement.

Stack’s work evokes contradictions – the embodiment of the natural and synthetic, the simultaneity of flatness and depth, and the illusion of movement within a still image. There is no logical reading of these paintings. They are a mirroring of the mysterious questions that define our changing relationship with the natural world. See more of Laura’s artwork at laurastackart.com

Melissa Loop uses her travels to explore notions of authenticity, place, and spirituality through our experiences of other cultures. Follow the Moon is inspired by her trips to Central America in 2012 and 2015 when she visited ancient Mayan sites. While her paintings are based on reality, the compositions are purposefully invented in an attempt to recreate rare moments of spiritual transcendence one encounters when taking a pilgrimage to a sacred place. With this particular group of paintings, Loop focused on exploring the space between imagination, reality, spiritual transcendence, and dreams. By doing this, she is weaving a tale of a pilgrim coming out of a deep sorrow and finding the origin of life.

Tie Yourself to Me, 2017, Synthetic polymer on panel, 18 x 24″

In Voiceatscript, Ute Bertog continues to explore the tenuous relationship between abstraction and language in her paintings to address themes of communication and its failure. For Voiceatscript she focuses on a deeply felt sense of speechlessness. Being speechless and without words to articulate one’s thoughts and opinions is seen either as a defiant gesture or – more often – as a sign of powerlessness. In order to regain a sense of power Bertog then reaches for readymade texts, quotes, and cliches as a starting point for her paintings, only to lose them again in the painting process. The goal is to introduce the necessary space for questions, imagination and play to take hold to freely renegotiate original content.

Amelia Biewald:

In a style that has become distinctly her own, Amelia Biewald intertwines imagery of romantic and powerful female figures, animals, real and imagined histories, and landscapes. Employing a wide range of materials, she creates lands full of sensual and alluring surfaces and textures, often combining references to the Old Masters and Surrealism with contemporary culture. Biewald mingles fact with fiction to recreate fables or intrigues. She captures states of transformation and curious unions seeking the pinnacle of a supernatural beauty.

Sausage Walkers, 2017, watercolor on rag paper, 11 x 11 inches.

In her upcoming show at Rosalux Gallery, Treats, Biewald paints her recent research into Renaissance eating and banquet culture. She creates scrumptious and alluring food presentations appropriate for the grandest dinner party. No grocery stores, no pre-packaged meats. During the Renaissance, if you could catch it, you ate it, and usually ALL of it. Let’s just say we are very picky and boring in our eating habits as compared to those of the 16th century…and the display of our comestibles is far less grand.

Artist Bio

Amelia works with a wide variety of materials creating painterly drawings and sculptural works, which often culminate in large multi-textural installations. She received a BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design and Goldsmith’s College, University of London and then pursued installation artwork at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design where she received her MFA. She has received various artist awards, residencies and fellowships for her work including The Skowhegan School Of Painting & Sculpture Residency, a Bush Foundation Fellowship and a Jerome Foundation Fellowship. She recently completed artist residencies at Art Garda, Sirmione, Italy and The Wassaic Project, NY. Amelia’s solo exhibition Autour De La Fin Du Monde was on view at The Soo Visual Arts Center in 2016.

John Gaunt

I have an empiricist approach to making. In recent years I have been developing a kind of “graphic scaffolding” inspired by weather and the shifting architecture of rivers. This scaffolding or intuitive gesture has become a malleable motif for me across artistic processes – allowing me to generate new combinations of abstract structures, illusionistic spaces and diagrammatic drawing. The accumulation of this practice is beginning to yield a kind of personal topology.

Mend, Oil on Canvas, 22″ x 26″

Artist Bio

John Gaunt has been active in university teaching since 1995. Educated in the United States and abroad, he maintains a studio practice in Minneapolis that embraces generative processes through painting, drawing and model building. Gaunt is a member of Rosalux Gallery in NE Minneapolis where he exhibits his work annually.

Building on a career that began as a realist painter, Gaunt has distilled his research into an abstract language that is at once gestural and restrained. Interested in the idea of painting and drawing serving as a proposition, the work offers closure yet resists naming – a desirable tension that occupies his current practice.

His work has been exhibited regionally and nationally and acquired in both public and private collections. He has held numerous visiting artist and guest lecturer positions including, the Burren College of Art in Ireland, the International Academy Neukloster Germany, School of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Kansas, Gustavus Adolphus College, Cazenovia College, University of Minnesota, Hamline University, and University of Wisconsin Stout.

Rosalux Gallery presents “Vivid Relics” – a new exhibition featuring the dynamic
paintings of Shawn McNulty and folk-inspired works by Michael Sweere. Each artist
creates work that commands the attention of the viewer, and both McNulty and Sweere
are featured in the U.S. Bank Stadium art collection.

Shawn McNulty’s signature abstractions have evolved over the past 20 years into a
more organic territory with some subtle ties back to his geometric pieces with rigid
edges. He utilizes a “shoe palette knife,” which allows him to work the canvas on the
floor with his feet, along with random tools like a Swiffer and pieces of plastic. The
result of this process is refreshing and innovative forms comprised of thick acrylic and
pumice, along with his masterful grasp of color theory. McNulty is essentially an action
painter, but there’s a heavy dose of energized color fields throughout his work, which
lend itself to a “calmness over chaos” vibe. His work can be found in private and
corporate collections all over the world including that of General Mills and President Bill
Clinton.

With the recent installation of his mural at the new Webber Park Library in Minneapolis,
Michael Sweere shifts gears and brings something completely different to Rosalux
Gallery in June. Mr. Sweere’s affinity of American folk art is evident in his newest
installation. A detour from his familiar mosaic work, the exhibition features a wide
range of polychromed (painted) woodcarvings. His characters – inspired
by imagination, native tales and urban folklore invite viewers of all ages to experience
the wonder of “Folk-O- Rama.”

Time/Keep : David Malcolm Scott and Rebecca Krinke

Rosalux Gallery is pleased to announce Time/Keep, an exhibition of new work by David Malcolm Scott and Rebecca Krinke featuring a large-scale sculptural work by Rebecca and a suite of paintings and drawings by David. The exhibition brings together the artists’ shared interest in time and memory, with a particular interest in what can be remembered or recorded and what can only be sensed or imagined.

David Malcolm Scott presents a new series of works exploring time and place – featuring a 30’ long watercolor scroll that literally starts with the formation of galaxies and moves forward through terrestrial epochs. David then uses this piece with its timeline format to add small scroll paintings above and below to reveal memories and dreams of one person’s life, in this case, the artist himself.

Time and place are highlighted in different ways in David’s two other series on view: in Weekly Commute, vivid slices of the sky are seen framed by dramatic building silhouettes, and in the stylized landscapes, the deep time of geological formations are juxtaposed with the more fleeting forms of forests, grasses, cities, and skies.

Rebecca Krinke presents a large installation, The Keep, which creates a domestic, psychological space of wonder and terror. The Keep continues her series of bed sculptures, although here a charred 4-poster bed hangs from the ceiling, upside down, bound by black-feathered walls – becoming a more abstract container/portal of space. Stacks of her dozens of black bound notebooks are visible but inaccessible on the burned wood floor below.

“Keep” as a noun originated in the Middle Ages, and was a place used as a refuge of last resort should the castle fall to an adversary. Rebecca’s installation evokes questions about what we keep, where we keep, and the costs of keeping: memories, secrets, notebooks, relationships, possessions, houses…This work and her larger practice is both highly personal and collective – in its explorations of private, public, and liminal space.

Rosalux Gallery is pleased to present two solo shows by Minneapolis artists Laura Stack and Melissa Loop. In Fabricated Real, Loop’s landscape paintings use her travels to Mayan ruins in Central America as a subject to explore notions of how we form assumptions about authenticity, place, and spirituality through our explorations and ill-informed ideas of other cultures. In Fluere, Stack’s abstract ink paintings suggest an amalgam of the natural and the synthetic where shapes morph into odd, though vaguely familiar forms and ink patterns bloom, dissolve, and disperse.
Contact at artist’s website: Laurastackart.com and Melissaloop.com

Laura Stack’s hyper-color ink paintings allude to a bodily, cellular or chemical world with its own rules and physics. Her work suggests paradoxes and simultaneities; the paradox that living things can now embody synthetic elements, the simultaneity of flatness and depth, and the illusion of movement that can be suggested within still images. Stack’s art practice is motivated by her curiosity in nature and science. Her paintings are an imagined mirroring of artificial biological or what we might call the “new natural”.

Laura Stack, Fluere 3, ink on paper, 26″x 20″

About these paintings, Melissa Loop says: “I was in Tikal sitting on top of the highest temple after sunset with about a dozen other tourists. We were listening to our Mayan guide tell us a story about him and his twin brother born in the rainforest. The Mayans believe that twins are of the gods. A sign of good luck. In the distance, the tops of the other temples peaked above the rainforest and we watched a lightning storm dance in the sky. Part of the scene was a setup created for us tourists. However, part of it was a rare moment in time that contained all of the mystic and spiritual clarity that we search for when traveling to faraway places. The setup cliche became an actual moment of transendence. By making these half fantasy paintings, I participate in the cliche. However, I can’t help but search for those rare moments where everything transcends and becomes magical again.”

“Sticky Ridges and other perils of silent senses” features the paintings of Laura Stack and paintings/drawings of Val Jenkins in a two-person exhibition at Rosalux Gallery. Both artists share an interest in exploring spatial perception through the simultaneity of flatness and depth, and the illusion of movement that can be suggested within still images. Laura Stack creates a fluid spatial world into which the viewer projects themselves into another world, a bodily or cellular world – a world with its own rules and physics. Val Jenkins’ makes work that she describes as projecting into the space of the viewer, so there is a moment of recognition between materiality and illusion.

Valerie Jenkins’ oil paintings and graphite drawings are both pictures of space and they inhabit space as objects. Phenomena gleaned from the material and virtual world create an internal structure that is both subterranean and architectural. Viewed all together, the work functions as a trace of everyday experience; where such concerns as distance and proximity, ambiguity and contradiction, matter and its negation, invite speculation about illusion and reality. http://www.valeriejenkinsart.com/